Difficulty level: Moderate, requires some bridging across multiple networks
Time: 1 hour initially, then 10 minutes once a week
Investment required: Some for main bridge and STG purchases
Possible Return: $2,000+
Risk/reward ratio: low risk - high reward
Airdrop opportunity
The main LayerZero airdrop appears to consist of around 8+ key campaigns. Most of these you need real funds to do, but there is one you can use testnet tokens which I will cover first.
Please note that using only the testnet may greatly limit your airdrop rewards, but if like many people have no funds, then it may start your airdrop funding!
The main activities are:
Bridge funds via usdcdemo.layerzero.network/bridge
Stargate Bridge, Staking Funds (and Guild Tasks), and DAO Voting
Bridge funds via aptosbridge.com
Bridge funds via bitcoinbridge.network
Bridge funds via testnetbridge.com
Swap via liquidswap.com
Cross-chain exchange through SUSHI
Based on the research I've done, I think these are the most important ones to focus on, but if your airdrop budget is going to increase, then you can consider the following activities for additional rewards:
Brilliant Capital
anger trading
Mongen Finance
angular protocol
hash stream
I won't cover the last 5 in this tutorial, but at least know they are options.
Opportunities are rumored to be worth $2,000 or more.
What is LayerZero?
According to their website:
LAYERZERO, a full-chain interoperability protocol. LAYERZERO supports the implementation of cross-chain applications using low-level communication primitives.
Basically, LayerZero enables you to interact with D'Apps across multiple blockchains. LayerZero calls it “omni-channel interoperability,” what I more simply call the ability to operate seamlessly across multiple blockchains.
It’s important to note that LayerZero is not a blockchain like Arbitrum or Ethereum, but a protocol that facilitates messaging across multiple blockchains.
If you want to know more about their protocol from a technical perspective, feel free to read their white paper — https://layerzero.network/pdf/LayerZero_Whitepaper_Release.pdf
funds
As you can see from the chart below, since March 2021, LayerZero has received 5 rounds of $263 million in funding. It’s encouraging that Sequoia Capital provided Series A funding and then came back a year later to invest again – a sign of confidence in the project.
Speaking of funding LayerZero has received funding from some of the biggest names in the venture capital world. A cursory look at their website reveals who has invested in names like a16z (also known as Andressen Horowitz), who is Project TVL’s largest VC. There are also well-known names like Sequoia and popular blockchains like FTM and Avalanche, CEX and DEX Unisap Labs like Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures.
This shows that this technology can benefit blockchain generally, so these types of companies will want to get in early.
How much does it cost to run this airdrop?
I’d like to say it’s free to participate, but the reality is that to get the most airdrops, you’ll need to shell out some cash. There is a testnet element, but it is only one of 8 events, so revenue may be limited.
For me, I will start with $300 as my airdrop fund - my goal is to increase that $500 over the next few weeks as I want to try and increase my trading volume on this airdrop. It’s okay if you don’t have $300, but I think you’ll need at least $150 or so to meaningfully farm this drop. Once the gas fee for bridging and swapping is less than this, it will be eaten up very quickly.
but! This is just my opinion, if you have $50 or $75, go for it - you'll definitely do better than someone who just uses the testnet, so do what's good for you.
I'm making some assumptions based on what we're seeing from Arbitrum, and my initial target is $10,000 in bridge volume. With $300, if I do 3 bridges every 3 days, I will hit $10,000 in about 4 weeks. I have to be very disciplined here and make sure I do a bridge every 3 days. I expect to lose about $80-$100 in bridge fees during these 4 weeks, but I will replenish my airdrop fund in a week or two.
If the snapshot isn't out by then, I'll move forward and see if I can hit my second transition goal of $25,000, but that will probably take about 10 weeks.
What do I need to participate in this airdrop?
It’s nothing more than an internet-connected device and a crypto wallet like Metamask or Trustwallet.
getting Started
Let's start with free activities.
1. Go to https://usdcdemo.layerzero.network/bridge and connect your wallet. Your screen should look like this.
At the bottom of the page you will see 3 testnet faucet links – you can visit these links and get testnet USDC to start bridging. I recommend making all selections so you can bridge in and bridge out.
For the sake of transparency, I ran into some real challenges getting USDC into Goerli, so I started with Fuji first.
After obtaining the testnet token, start bridging:
Bridge USDC on the Avalanche Fiji testnet to USDC on ETH Goerli:
Select Fuji as your From network and Goerli Testnet as your To network. Set $1 USDC in the USDC field. I had $1 in testnet USDC, so I just hit the max and it automatically added my $1.
Now press the transfer button:
This will initiate the transfer process of USDC from Fuji to the Goerli network. You'll see a timer at the top of the page - but be skeptical, my transfer took a long time.
In fact, to be honest, it failed twice and then got lucky the third time, so you need to be patient...really patient! !
However, when I finished the tutorial, the Transfer USDC button turned gray and then the following message appeared on the screen:
So I think the testnet option is no longer an option...so if it's not available when you run this tutorial, then either go to the mainnet option or go to another free airdrop tutorial.
Stargate Bridge, Staking Funding, and DAO Voting
Stargate (STG) is like LayerZero's international train station hub. It allows users to bridge assets across multiple major chains using LayerZero technology:
avalanche
2.Arbitration
3. Binance Smart Chain
4. Ethereum
5. Phantom
6. Métis
7. Optimism
8.Polygon
The first activity we have to do is move money from one place to another.
I currently have a $300 USDC airdrop fund on Arbitrum for LayerZero, so I need to start there. My first bridge would be to Polygon where the gas cost would be super low.
First I select the coin and network I want to transfer from, in this case on Arbitrum for the USDC and To fields I will select USDC and Matic.
I enter the total amount I wish to bridge, and then since this is my first time bridging USDC to Arbitrum, I need to approve the use of USDC. Once approval is confirmed via the meta mask wallet, the button will change to Transfer.
Once I'm ready to bridge, I just click transfer, confirm the transaction in my wallet, and my bridge is in progress.
I found a hidden link at the bottom of the page that I'm sure a lot of people will miss, but it's very useful. The link is Check Transfer Gas Estimator
It opens a table showing the average gas price between various Stargate connected networks.
You can see Fantom and Polygon have the lowest fees so you can move between the two to save some money but if I were an Omnichain interoperability protocol I wanted to reward people who use all my networks because that's what I want People do, so my gut feeling is that you'll need to transfer between multiple networks over time, and yes, that will cost gas money. You just have to think of it as the cost of doing business in an airdrop - accept the fact that you're going to need to spend some money, especially on ETH bridging.
Additionally, you'll need enough FTM, AVAX, ETH, BNB, OP, etc... on each chain you bridge, so keep that in mind as well.
After you submit the bridge, you'll see a transfer graph that shows a countdown of how long the transfer will take.
In this case, the bridge from Arbitrum to Polygon takes just over 5 minutes. Each chain bridge requires a different length of time. When I bridged from Polygon to Fantom it took over 15 minutes, so be aware of that when you transfer.
Once the transfer is complete it will be marked as completed and once you press the Got it button it will take you back to the main bridge screen so you can proceed to the next bridge.
We just completed the first bridge on the Stargate!
Now bridge to more networks to get these transactions and increase transaction volume.
I completed 3:
$300.00 USDC — Arbitrum to Polygon (takes 5 minutes)
$299.80 USDC — Polygon to Fantom (takes 15 minutes)
$299.62 USDC — Fantom to Avalanche (Took 27 seconds!)
$299.40 USDC — From avalanche to optimism (took 57 seconds)
Gas fees for these transactions averaged $0.40 each.
The second activity we can consider is staking funds on STG, we can perform 3 operations related to staking, hodling and LP farming in https://guild.xyz/stargate. However, the consensus seems to be that if funding is limited, Tasks 2 and 3 are a lower priority. This makes sense to me.
The tasks are:
Stake 25 STG
I actually bought and mortgaged 25 STG from my Arbitrum farm, so I'm already good. But I do recommend that you buy at least 25 and stake them as this will give you access to DAO voting, which I will cover later.
You can buy STG on CEXs like Binance, KuCoin, and Kraken or DEXs like Sushiswap, Uniswap, Pancakeswap, and TraderJoe.
Take Pancakeswap for example, it’s super fast and easy.
Once you have purchased 25STG (roughly $20 at current exchange rates), you can head to the Stake page on Stargate and select one of the available staking pools.
You can see there is a mining pool that I can stake with and the APR is not great at 1.46%, but that's not what we're interested in. By staking we can vote, which is the important action here.
Click on an available staking pool and you will be taken to a staking page where you can allocate your stake (I recommend 25STG) and select the length of time you wish to stake and press the Create Stake button.
I recommend 6 months, hopefully by then the LayerZero airdrop will be complete, but feel free to change that based on your circumstances. Personally, I locked mine in for 3 years purely for the opportunity to vote.
2. Hold 100 STG
The current price for 100 STG is around $86. This is a large portion of my airdrop fund, so I'll pass--I'll probably miss out here, but hopefully I'll benefit more by using the money elsewhere. However, if you have the funds, go ahead.
3. Provide at least $1,000 to the Stargate liquidity pool
Unfortunately, I don't have $1,000 in free funds to spend on a liquidity pool, so I can't do this, but if you do, just go to the "Pools" link in the main navigation and select the pool that works for you.
The third activity is voting.
By staking your STG for any period of time, you can vote on STG DAO decisions. It seems like voting may be a factor in the airdrop, so we just need to get enough STG and stake it to vote.
After obtaining STG shares, please visit https://snapshot.org/#/stgdao.eth
You will see a page that looks like this:
There are currently no proposals up for a vote, but to help better understand Arbitrum I will show you how it works in the form of an example.
First, you can see that there is a proposal waiting for a vote. It proposed returning $700 million in ARB to the DAO treasury. There have been a lot of reports in recent days about uncontrolled fund flows in the DAO, so a lot of people are voting.
All you do is click anywhere in that particular proposal space and it will take you to the proposal page.
On the proposal page, you will initially see the vote title, whether it is still active or has been closed, and who proposed it.
In one you will see 5 more sections:
Here’s a summary (or abstract) of the ballot proposal – this should give you a pretty good idea of what’s on the ballot.
This is where you vote. You can vote for the proposal (indicating that you agree) or you can vote against the proposal (indicating that you disagree).
Here is some information about the chain for this vote, the voting start and end dates and the block height at which the snapshot will be taken.
This shows the current results of the polls completed so far.
This shows the last few votes.
Now that I've read all the information, it's time to vote. I headed to the section circled in red below to vote.
I personally will vote in favor of this proposal.
Why? Regardless of whether the transfer of funds was done in good faith or not, to me it undermines the entire DAO process for entities to act in this way. I think it sends a strong message that this kind of authoritarian decision-making is unacceptable.
But this is my personal opinion.
So to vote, I press "Support" and then I can click the vote button
The system will check if the block I listed under information has voting rights and if I am able to vote, it will accept my vote which I can then confirm in my wallet.
I've voted on a few proposals so far - to see what you've voted on, go to "View Profile" under the wallet listed in the top right corner.
If you have voted, it looks like this:
3. Bridge funds via aptosbridge.com
Now we visit https://theaptosbridge.com/bridge.
This is slightly different from the previous bridge we did with the Metamask wallet. When we bridge with Aptos, we need to connect to both Metamask and Aptos wallets.
Click to connect wallet
This will open a new screen where you can select Metamask and Aptos wallets. Aptos is based on the Cosmos blockchain, which is not an EVM-compatible wallet, so you have an Aptos-specific wallet capable of interacting with the chain.
You have a few options, but the main Aptos wallets are Martian, Petra, and Pontem. I don't think it really makes a difference which wallet you choose, because ultimately we want to drive transactions and value on LayerZero, not these wallets.
However, Pontem already has airdrops available to early adopters, so it might be worth using Petra or Martian to cover your bases.
For the purposes of this article, I will be using the Martian wallet (but feel free to use the Petra wallet if you prefer).
After clicking Connect Wallets and seeing the Connect Wallet option, I selected "Connect Metamask" under EVM and "Connect Martian" under Aptos
Once connected, you should see your connected wallet in the upper right corner of your screen.
Now we are ready to start establishing the bridge between the two networks.
However, before we can start bridging, we must perform one action. This airdrop requires at least some Aptos tokens to pay for gas. Aptos can be purchased from most centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin, etc…
I bought 2 APT on Coinbase but you can buy a lot less but I think you need at least 0.5 APT.
After purchasing, you can transfer to a new Martian or Petra wallet.
I don't have a huge airdrop fund so I can't really diversify it without hurting my trade value goals, and switching back from Aptos can take a few days and I don't want to hold off my main capital for that long. The $300 fund I have is mostly for Stargate Bridge, so I'm going to move some small amounts from Arbitrum to Aptos to tally my trades.
I want to transfer 0.0025 ETH on Arbitrum to WETH on Aptos, so I enter 0.0025 in the first box (this is the sending wallet, in this case our metamask wallet). Just make sure WETH and Aptos networks are selected in the receiving wallets section below.
Then I press the TRANSFER button to start the bridging process:
A page will now open stating that you need to "Register a token first"
Then shortly after you should see your Aptos wallet popup asking you to approve the transfer. If you're happy with your gas bill, click Approve
Once approved, your Metamask wallet will pop up and ask you to confirm the transfer of Arbitrum ETH from your metmask wallet.
Once a transaction is confirmed, it will show you roughly how long it will take before the transaction is completed.
You can also send ETH back to Arbitrum, but it's very gas intensive, so if you're only sending $5, expect to pay almost that fee when returning gas, but think of it as the cost of farming the airdrop.
I send my ETH back and it takes a very, very long time. Therefore, don't use funds that you may need soon.
Bridge funds via bitcoinbridge.network
You can bridge Bitcoin between various networks, and LayerZero operates the bitcoinbridge.network.
It works exactly like Stargate, but you can bridge BTC.b from one chain to another.
First, you need to connect to your MM wallet and Aptos wallet just like you would with theaptosbridge.com.
You need to obtain BTC.b to make the transfer. Since I mostly use Arbitrum right now, I just went to https://traderjoexyz.com/arbitrum/trade and selected the token I wanted to exchange for BTC.b.
Luckily, I already had some WBTC that I could easily swap, but you can choose any coin you want:
After obtaining yourBTC.b, you can return to https://bitcoinbridge.network/bridge to complete the exchange. I plan to bridge my BTC.b purely for the low gas fees.
I chose Arbitrum as my From chain and Polygon as my To chain. I don't have much BTC.b, so I select MAX and click TRANSFER.
To help my transaction number I transferred it back but it only took a moment. I will add this to my list of LayerZero actions to complete every 3-4 days.
5. Bridge funds via testnetbridge.com
By using https://testnetbridge.com/ you can bridge ETH from Ethereum, Arbitrum and Optimism and receive gETH on the Goerli Network.
gETH is a key requirement for many testnets, it is needed for things like confirming transactions and staking. It allows users to “fully demo” the protocol without using real ETH.
While we have access to sites like https://www.goerlifaucet.com, the amounts we can receive every day are getting smaller and smaller, making it harder to test new crypto projects.
To solve this conundrum, we can now bridge and swap ETH for gETH, which we can then use for airdrop projects.
Simply visit https://testnetbridge.com/, connect your wallet and select the chain you wish to bridge ETH from. Enter the amount of ETH you want to bridge and press TRANSFER. This will trigger your metamask wallet for you to confirm the transaction.
Once a transaction is confirmed it is usually quick and you will see the transaction progress at the top of the page.
Note that if you transfer ETH from Ethereum you will pay the equivalent amount of gETH, and you may lose a lot of gETH this way, so I would leave it to Arbitrum and Optimism if you can.
6. Swap via liquidswap.com
Go to https://bridge.liquidswap.com/
It looks and works very similar to Aptosbridge, but the graphics are different; however it is a key bridge for Aptos chains using LayerZero technology, so it's worth using it at least a few times.
There are two things to consider:
In my experience, APTOS gas fees are horrendous - they can range from $3 to $5 per transaction, so small balances can be depleted very quickly.
Transferring back from the APTOS network can take 2-3 days so it can tie up your air investment, so keep that in mind. Maybe schedule it after you've done some transactions on other chains and you don't need the funds for a few days.
Just follow the Stargate instructions as they are the same as liquidswap.
At this point, you’re well on your way to successfully farming LayerZero airdrops!
